The literary relation between Atwood's The
Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), and Susanna Strickland Moodie's 1852 sketches of
immigrant life, Roughing It in the Bush, or, Forest Life in Canada has been the
subject of a number of critical analyses,1
many of which adopt the heuristic metaphors of "violent duality" and
"paranoid schizophrenia" that Atwood applies to Moodie in the
"Afterword".2
This Afterword has had an effect on Moodie and Atwood criticism very similar to
that described by Anna Balakian as "false influence," in which a model text is
distorted or transformed by a new text which illuminates the model text and inspires
followers.3 So powerful is Atwood's reconstruction that not only most
interpretations of The Journals of Susanna Moodie, but many independent discussions of Roughing
It in the Bush as well,4
have succumbed to its lure. A new reading of this literary relation seems called
for, one which considers Atwood's response to Moodie in terms of the creative relation
Moodie achieved, by accepting and resisting inherited European aesthetics, with the
wilderness landscape of colonial Canada. Such a reading is suggested by Atwood's
poetic concern with the relationship of Canadians to their own landscape, and by the
explicit stance of her criticism: "For the members of a country or culture, shared
knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity.
Without that knowledge we will not survive."5

In The Journals of
Susanna Moodie, Atwood interrogates Moodie's paradigms in a manner which raises the
difficulty of knowing anything at all, when we can articulate that knowing only through
language already opaque with the words of others. The reactive nature of The
Journals suggests that the relation between these texts is one of negative influence,6
an undisputed influence which is formulated as a reaction to a prior text. In
Hermerén's formulation, this is an antithetical relation,7
but it may be more accurate to say here that positive and negative influence do not form a
simple opposition, but a linear, sliding scale. Certain aspects of The Journals
replicate Roughing It very closely  the teadrinker's dialogue in "The
Charivari," "Brian the Still-hunter," Moodie's stance in relation to
landscape, and those moments when Moodie's paradigms of landscape appreciation break down
 and insofar as replication occurs, this is a case of positive influence.
Atwood, however, does not merely replicate but interrogates and comments on
Moodie's presentation, a reactive mode which points to negative influence.

It is in the area of
negative influence that intertextuality has been most useful.8
Bakhtin's formulation of intertextuality understands the dialogic nature of language as a
struggle between socio-linguistic points of view.9
The irreducible differences between these points of view mean that no unitary
language is ever communicated,10
but as stylized objects of representation, these languages penetrate and interanimate each
other.11 While there is little or no direct authorial voice, the
novel owns a "verbal-ideological centre" where all the different languages
intersect. As Kristeva indicates, the transposition of signs involved in the
intertextual citation is never innocent, but always transformed, distorted, or displaced
by its inclusion in a new work, to suit the value system of the speaking subject.12

Using Bakhtin's dialogic
paradigm, we can see that alien sociolects are, for Moodie, objects of representation
which are destabilized and interrogated.13
Chief among these are eighteenth-century sociolects of landscape appreciation,
which turn on the control of the phenomenal world by the gazing subject. The gaze
involves a power relationship between the active, gazing subject and the passive
object. Not only does the active function of the gaze objectify what is seen, but
from the vantage point of the subject, the gazer actively imposes limits on her
object. Gairdner points out that in the European Romantic tradition of which Moodie
is a part, comprehending the phenomenal world implies the subjective relation of the
thinker to the object, and Moodie's gaze, partaking of this paradigm, empties the object
of any external, objective reality.14

The aesthetics of the
sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain
required the objectification of landscape in the gaze of the human subject. In these
paradigms, the phenomenal world in its unmalleable reality becomes, by the exercise of the
gaze, an object, and its 'reality' is thus constructed by and in relation to the subject
of the gaze. This structure is an economic one in that it is a structure of gain and
loss, of "interested calculation,"15
it is also political, in that it implies and demands control of the object by the speaking
subject whose gaze constructs the object. Attempting to exercise this aesthetic
control over the Canadian landscape, the Moodie character is faced by a phenomenal world
which eludes her control, thus subverting the inherited paradigm; this subversion is
consciously related in Roughing It in the Bush. Moreover, it is at these
moments when the phenomenal world eludes Moodie's control that Atwood enters, and, in the
poems of The Journals of Susanna Moodie, transforms the landscape into a subject
position.

As Christopher Hussey
points out, the aesthetic appreciation of landscape requires the gradual relinquishing of
notions of the features of landscape as signifiers in a moral and religious discourse,16
a discourse which prevents the disinterested appreciation which is necessary to an
aesthetic paradigm. Such paradigms require a break from the appreciation of
landscape in terms of use-value, and this break has as a necessary condition a fairly high
level of material prosperity and security.17
This is not so much a break, but a removal; pragmatic considerations, although
disguised, remain an important part of landscape aesthetics. Real physical danger
inhibits aesthetic appreciation; importantly, the prosperity requirement also implies that
aesthetic appreciation is the province of the educated, monied class. In the absence
of a level of material prosperity which allows for both the security and the leisure to
look about one, what is appreciated in the phenomenal world is the available and the
useful; as Moodie suggests quite late in her character's development, the row of corn
rather than the decorative water-colour.

Burke's description of
the beautiful, associated with the tame, the non-threatening, and the submissive, and
linked to the passion of society, which turns on gratification and pleasure18
seems directly related to this appreciation of the use-value of the phenomenal world.
Although he argues that utility and fitness are not productive of beauty, the
practical application of his conditions of beauty to the discourse of landscape
aesthetics, most importantly the notion of submission, suggests both the control of the
beautiful object by the human subject and the use of that beautiful object for human
gratification.

The privileging of the
subject in the aesthetic of the sublime occurs quite differently. Kant points out
that "we are inaccurate if we term an object of nature sublime; all we can say is
that the object lends itself to a sublimity discoverable in the mind."19
It is here apparent that the importance of the object is in the emotions it arouses
in the subject. Nor does the importance of powerful emotions to this aesthetic
paradigm counter my assertion that the subject's control of the object is fundamental
here. Kant, Burke, and Schiller all argue that a certain distance is necessary
between the subject and the terrible object for the experience to be productive of the
sublime.20

Thomas Weiskel's model
of the sublime moment may give some indication of how this control is exercised. The
habitual system of reading landscape assumes a natural order of signs which is predicated
on the authority of the Word, Logos; in traditional rhetorical doctrine, signs did have a
natural order, and thus the habitual system of reading, landscape or text, can now be seen
as naive and complacent. The sublime moment begins where this habitual system breaks
down and the accustomed order is violated.21
In Weiskel's reading, an object arrests the mind and fills it with an understanding
of infinity and of terror; a discontinuity occurs with this arrest of habitual perception
which ends when the mind begins to comprehend its own power, through metaphorical
identification with infinity.22
In economic terms, what is gained in the sublime moment is a comprehension of the
value of the human sign at the price of transformation of the object, in its unmalleable
reality, to a relation with the human sign. In political terms, the experience of
transcendence asserts the control of the human sign over the phenomenal world.

The aesthetic of the
picturesque, while abandoning altogether any pretensions to transcendence, is nevertheless
equally concerned with the transformation of nature's unmalleable reality to an object
whose sole significance lies in its control by the human gaze. The term picturesque
refers to a mode of aesthetic vision which emphasized visual qualities at the expense of
either rational qualities or associated ideas.23
It is an aesthetic concerned with surface appearances; the object of the
picturesque gaze is almost devoid of value, of transcendence, of any power to inspire the
passions, but is instead formed, literally and figuratively, by the human subject's
ability to comprehend it as art.

The application of
picturesque conventions to gardening often required the physical alteration of the
landscape, even to the extent of building false ruins or sham castles, and on one occasion
staffing a newly built hermitage with a straw 'hermit.'24
Such alterations both underscore the importance of the gaze and human control to
this mode of vision, and link the picturesque to the earlier valuation of landscape in
use-value terms. It is also clear that landscape aesthetics were largely the
province of the educated and monied class; an analogy may then be drawn between the
control of the phenomenal world, placed into the service of art, and the politico-economic
control of the non-monied classes. It is intriguing, then, to note that the figures
considered appropriate to a picturesque landscape were those of the peasantry, who as
objects of the gaze are likewise valued in terms of the subject's ability to comprehend
them as art.

In these paradigms of
landscape appreciation, then, value does not inhere in the phenomenal world, but exists
for and in relation to the human subject. When, however, nature eludes the control
of the gaze, as I shall show to be so often represented in Roughing It in the Bush,
it ceases to be beautiful, since what is beautiful is that which submits; it ceases to be
picturesque, refusing the alterations which would transform it into art; it refuses the
distance between subject and itself which is properly productive of the sublime moment; it
ceases to be an object controlled by the human subject, and intrudes itself on that
subjectivity. Schiller suggests that without human control, nature becomes a
"force":

From being a slave of Nature, so long as he
merely perceives her, Man becomes her lawgiver as soon as she becomes his thought.
She who had formerly ruled him only as force, now stands as object before the
judgement of his glance. What is object to him has no longer power over him; for in
order to be object it must experience his own power. Insofar as he gives form to
matter, and so long as he gives it, he is invulnerable to her influences; for nothing can
injure a spirit except what deprives it of freedom, and Man proves his freedom by his very
forming of the formless.25

Textually, when the phenomenal world intrudes
itself as force, it exerts control over the subject and the aestheticism of the text
breaks down.

The Grosse Isle scene in
Roughing It in the Bush26
is the first of these moments. From the vantage point of the ship, the Moodie
character commands an excellent view of the "surpassing grandeur of the scene."
A "mountain chain" forms "the stupendous background to this sublime
view," the clouds "cast into denser shadow the vast forest belt" that
girdles these "mighty giants" in their "rugged and awful beauty";
Moodie's response to this "sublime view" is "a thrill of wonder and
delight" so that her "eyes were blinded with tears  blinded with
the excess of beauty," an understandable response, since "never had [she] beheld
so many striking objects all blended into one mighty whole!" The middle space
 note that Moodie is utilizing the painter's terms of background and middle
space here, in the picturesque tradition  is "occupied by tents and sheds for
the cholera patients, and its wooded shores dotted over with motley groups"; this,
with the rest of the "rocky isle" adds greatly "to the picturesque effect
of the scene." It is, I think, an interesting footnote to our discussion of
figures in a picturesque landscape and their objectification as art that Moodie's first
consideration of the ravages of cholera is in its contribution to the picturesque effect
of what is, under her gaze, a scene.

Once on the island,
however, the Moodie character's perception is vastly different. The party lands on
rocks, which "the rays of an intensely scorching sun had rendered so hot that [she]
could scarcely place [her] foot on them," the motley groups which so added to the
picturesque effect of the scene qua scene are now an "extraordinary
spectacle," with "the confusion of Babel" amongst the "hard-featured,
sun-burnt harpies," from whom Moodie shrinks "with feelings almost akin to
fear." This is not the fear which is considered productive of the sublime, but
rather, as Bentley points out, Moodie's response to the threat of social disintegration
posed by the republican spirit of North America.27
The figures of her landscape have eluded her power to objectify them as art, and
this is unmistakably a relation of power: Moodie observes that "our passengers . . .
who while on board ship had conducted themselves with the greatest propriety, and appeared
the most quiet, orderly set of people in the world, no sooner set foot upon the
island than they became infected by the same spirit of insubordination and misrule,
and were just as insolent and noisy as the rest" [emphasis mine]. It
appears that the new world enables the objects to escape the limits imposed on them by
Moodie, and her resentment of this refusal of subordination is palpable throughout the
text.

Here, as elsewhere, the
naiveté of the Moodie persona is abundantly apparent. MacDonald suggests that this
scene is deliberately framed to imply irony in the conventional description of the
landscape.28 The Moodie character longs to see the island, which
"looks a perfect paradise at this distance," up close. The captain
disagrees, suggesting that "many things look well at a distance which are bad enough
when near." At the verbal-ideological centre there is an awareness of the high
contrast between two socio-linguistic points of view: the appreciation of the external
world as art, and the difficulties posed by that external world in its unmalleable
reality. The belief system of the Moodie character is an object of representation,
undercut here and elsewhere by contrasts with other signifying systems. This use of
contrast, according to McCarthy, is ironic, as the author-Moodie mocks the naiveté and
romanticism of the Moodie character.29
For Whitlock, the discrediting and interrogation of the narrator and the
multiplicity of narrators is part of a "complex textual interchange between the
retrospective narrator and her inexperienced younger self, which allows the inadequacies
of colonial romanticism to become manifest and a number of different perspectives to
compete."30
The fall from idealism, according to Whitlock, is a leitmotif throughout this text,
and it reflects Moodie's desire to see realistically, a determination which led her into
"the complex issues of the relationship between art and artifice, literature and
reality, the realisation that literature did not reflect reality in any simple way but
raised complex issues of the interrelationship between the observer and the observed, the
conventional and the 'real.' "31
While Whitlock's remarks are intriguing, I suggest that it is not so much in Moodie
but in Atwood's reactive text that the complex issues Whitlock describes are investigated.

The distance-proximity
plot of the Grosse Isle scene is used in a number of places in the text to suggest the
difference between appearance and reality, and this means that the Moodie character is
being re-educated to abandon an aesthetics of landscape which is patently inappropriate to
her new environment. As the text progresses, the perspective of the Moodie character
will draw closer to the verbal-ideological centre, until in the final sections of the text
they are nearly indistinguishable. As I will show, however, the perceptual paradigms
of the Moodie character are only superficially altered, and the more profound
epistemological investigation Whitlock posits is never realized.

Leaving Grosse Isle,
with the island once again at a distance, Moodie finds that "the island and its
sister group looked like a second Eden just emerged from the waters of chaos" (RITB
27)  an interesting observation, in light of her earlier description of the
"confusion of Babel" amongst the immigrants on the island. It is the
restoration of a Burkean "certain distance" that makes this re-evaluation
possible.

What strikes the Moodie
character most on the way to Quebec, however, is the "majestic river, its vast
magnitude, and the depth and clearness of its waters, and its great importance to the
colony" (RITB 27). Here, the use-value of the St. Lawrence River is
linked in syntactical equivalence to aesthetic considerations, suggesting that it is the
coincidence of these values which causes the mind to "expand with the sublimity of
the spectacle."

The sublime view causes
the Moodie character's mind to soar upward "in gratitude and adoration to the Author
of all being, to thank him for having made this lower world so wondrously fair" (RITB
27). This is clearly an instance of the sublime moment, and in the moment of
apparent submission to the transcendent god-term, the Moodie character achieves a kind of
self-transcendence which recalls Weiskel's model of the sublime.32
By both invoking the ultimate authority and identifying herself with that authority
in the metaphorical moment of the sublime, the Moodie character is able to evade the
consequences of disobeying authority; the burden of God's authority is lifted and there is
an influx of power.33
She has internalized the relationship of her imagination to the river which is her
object, and in that moment of internalization achieved transcendence by affiliating
herself, aloft, with God. The river, she has said, "would have been sufficient
to have riveted the attention, and claimed the admiration of every thinking mind."
She is such a mind, of course, and in the moment of religious submission she
achieves, by her ability to appreciate the "spectacle" before her, her own
aggrandizement. Aesthetic appreciation, it may be seen, redounds less to the credit
of the pleasing object than it does to the educated aesthete who appreciates it.

Even more interesting is
the purpose to which Moodie's first view of the sublime situation of Quebec City is
turned. She exhorts Canadians to "Rejoice and be worthy of her [the
city]," to exclaim, " 'She is ours! God gave her to us, in her beauty and
strength!' " in a passage which curiously succeeds in eliding the victory of Wolfe
over Montcalm to attribute the conquest of Lower Canada to divine agency, a strategy which
both exalts and justifies  can God err?  British imperialism:

Canadians!  as long as you remain true to
yourselves and to her, what foreign invader could ever dare to plant a hostile flag upon
that rock-defended height, or set his foot upon a fortress rendered impregnable by Nature?
. . . What elements of future greatness and prosperity encircle you on every side!
Never yield up these solid advantages to become an humble dependent on the great republic
 wait patiently, loyally, lovingly upon the illustrious parent from which you sprang
. . . (RITB 29)

The sublime spectacle of Quebec is enjoined to
inspire Canadians to resist not only invasion but the dread spectre of republicanism,
lurking south of the border. Furthermore, properly obedient Canadians will be
rewarded with the achievement of material prosperity, and it is interesting that the
aesthetic spectacle is linked here to the issues of capitalism and imperialism.
Weiskel notes that individualism, asserted in the sublime moment, takes capitalism
as its economic corollary,34
and that in the background of the Romantic sublime is "the heady confidence of
imperialism."35
This link is reiterated in the class relations of Roughing It; the Moodie
character says,

I was not a little amused at the extravagant
expectations of some of our steerage passengers. The sight of the Canadian shores
had changed them into persons of great consequence. The poorest and the
worst-dressed, the least deserving and the most repulsive in mind and morals, exhibited
most disgusting traits of self-importance. . . . Girls, who were scarcely able to
wash a floor decently, talked of service with contempt, unless tempted to change their
resolution by the offer of twelve dollars a month. To endeavour to undeceive them
was a useless and ungracious task. (RITB 31)

Superficially, the steerage passengers are
derided, but the Moodie character as well is the object of representation, and as later
developments show, she is far more guilty of "extravagant expectations," than
they. This is aptly illustrated in the sketch of Tom Wilson, whose ruin in the
colony is brought about by his expectations; intriguingly, Wilson points out that, his
expectations being less than J.W.D. Moodie's expectations, his chance of success is
better. Since he fails, we are left to assume that the same danger threatens the
Moodies, and in fact their enterprises in the bush did fail spectacularly.

The Moodie character's
tendency to turn the lower classes as well as the landscape into objects before her gaze
is clearest in her description of the drowning she witnessed at Montreal. From the
vantage point of the ship, she commands a view of the "fearful spectacle,"
saying "[t]here is something terribly exciting in beholding a fellow-creature in
imminent peril . . . to feel in your own person all the dreadful alternations of hope and
fear . . ." (RITB 44). The sailor may be a
"fellow-creature," but is not fellow enough to stir the Moodie character from an
essentially aesthetic appreciation of the scene before her; he remains an object.
Despite her apparent concern for the sailor's fate, the Moodie character is again
undercut: " 'Is it possible they will let a human being perish, and so near the
shore, when an oar held out would save his life' . . . but not a hand stirred. Every
one seemed to expect from his fellows an effort which he was incapable of attempting
himself" (RITB 44-45). Moodie's judgement is an object of representation
here, and encompasses herself as well as the crowd.

The Moodie character's
enjoyment of the Canadian scenery is constantly reiterated, but she is always reminded
 by cold, by the cholera, by the insolent local inhabitants  of the difference
between Canada and her own land, where "Nature, arrayed in her green loveliness, had
ever smiled upon [her] like an indulgent mother" (RITB 65). Indeed, it
seems that, for the Moodie character, the ideal form of nature can only be seen in
England, and more specifically on the grounds of the old Hall, her "beloved
home": here, of course, nature is tamed and submissive, thoroughly under the control
of the English gentlefolk. The poem "The Lament of the Canadian Emigrant"
tellingly reveals this, contrasting "this far-distant shore," where "[t]he
sigh of the wild winds  the rush of the floods  / Is the only sad music
that wakens the woods" with England's "soft waving woodlands" and
"green daisied vales." Nature and England form an identity here:
"When my soul, dearest Nature! shall cease to adore thee, . . . Then the love I have
cherish'd, my country, for thee / In the breast of thy daughter extinguish'd shall
be" (RITB 77-78). This poem manifests the real content of the term
"Nature" for the Moodie character at this stage of her development, associated
as it is with the nurturing and maternal aspects36
and with the non-threatening, entirely controlled "soft waving woodlands."
Nature is only to be found in England; what greets Moodie in Canada is something
else entirely, something which confounds her inherited notions of the appropriate order of
the phenomenal world.

Interestingly, although
Moodie's descriptions are laden with key terms from the sociolects of landscape
aesthetics, these terms are divorced from their paradigms, and appreciative landscape
aesthetics are revealed as patently inappropriate to this environment. The
landscape, "unimproved by art," (RITB 175) proves to be unmalleable.
The sociolects of landscape aesthetics, finally, fail to assert the necessary
control over the object of Moodie's gaze, which retains its own ineluctable reality beyond
the language used for its description.

Outside of England,
"the prospect is indeed dreary" (RITB 84) as the Moodies finally arrive
at the first of their Canadian homes. "Prospect" can mean both a view of
nature, a scene, and human material and economic prospects.37
The polysemous quality of the word highlights that coincidence of aesthetic and
economic considerations we have already seen in Moodie's use of landscape aesthetics,
particularly in her elaboration of her family's dreary prospects: "Without, pouring
rain; within, a fireless hearth. . . . we amused ourselves, while waiting for the
coming of our party, by abusing the place, the country, and our own dear selves for our
folly in coming to it" (RITB 84). That the Moodie character will later
willingly praise Canada is unmistakably a change in prospect, in both meanings: "Let
[home-sick emigrants] wait a few years; the sun of hope will rise and beautify the
landscape, and they will proclaim the country one of the finest in the world" (RITB
175).

Landscape appreciation,
the sociolect of the educated class, is predicated on a material prosperity which,
interestingly enough, is often founded on property: the ownership and cultivation of land.
This is borne out in the use of the multi-voiced "prospect," and again in
Moodie's comparison of British and Canadian children:

The flowers, the green grass, the glorious
sunshine, the birds of the air, and the young lambs gambolling down the verdant slopes,
which fill the heart of a British child with a fond ecstasy, bathing the young spirit in
Elysium, would float unnoticed before the vision of a Canadian child; while the sight of a
dollar, or a new dress, or a gay bonnet, would swell its proud bosom with self-importance
and delight. . . . Such perfect self-reliance in beings so new to the world is
painful to a thinking mind. It betrays a great want of sensibility and mental
culture, and a melancholy knowledge of the arts of life. (RITB 148)

Notice that the ideal form of nature is the
province of the educated British child, while the Canadian child, whose "perfect
self-reliance" suggests that she does not belong to the leisure class (with which
Moodie still associates herself), is incapable of the cultured appreciation. The
Moodie character is aware, at this point in her development, that aesthetic appreciation
 "sensibility and mental culture"  cannot co-exist with
"knowledge of the arts of life." That this seems to be true redounds less to
Moodie's credit than it does to the local inhabitants, who can at least bake bread.

This passage is
immediately followed by a discussion of the Moodie character's misfortunes in the absence
of her servant. Despite her own often-demonstrated sensibilities, the Moodie
character is unskilled; she cannot even wash the baby clothes. In the dialogue
between Mrs. Joe and the Moodie character which follows, the warring of sociolinguistic
perspectives undercuts Moodie through ironic framing of her dialogue:

"Ah, I guess you don't look upon us as
fellow-critters, you are so proud and grand. I s'pose you Britishers are not made of
flesh and blood like us. You don't choose to sit down at meat with your helps.
Now, I calculate, we think them a great deal better than you." "Of
course," said [Moodie], "they are more suited to you than we are; they are
uneducated, and so are you. This is no fault in either; but it might teach you to
pay a little more respect to those who are possessed of superior advantages." (RITB
149)

It is difficult to perceive exactly what these
superior advantages can be, here in the backwoods; the Moodie character's educated
sensibilities might afford her considerable consolation, but without the material
prosperity which accompanies such mental culture in England, they afford her little
material comfort. In this sense, the Moodie character's paradigms have failed her:
the educated sensibility which ought to have guaranteed her control of the external world
does not, and her claims to superiority, valid in England, have no currency here:
"the titles of 'sir' or 'madam' were very rarely applied by inferiors" (RITB
210). What the character fails to realize is that the distinction she claims is
entirely irrelevant to her new environment. If she is unable to appreciate the
Canadian landscape because it doesn't suit her aesthetic paradigms, she is equally unable
to appreciate the skills which are locally valued. And yet we see in "The
Charivari" that her perspective has begun to change:

for a great deal of (British servants') seeming
fidelity and long and laborious service in our families, . . . we owe less to any moral
perception on their part of the superior kindness or excellence of their employers, than
to the mere feeling of assurance, that as long as they do their work well, and are
cheerful and obedient, they will be punctually paid their wages. (RITB 213)

Although the Moodie character, in retrospect,
prefers the Canadian to the British servant, it is interesting that she takes the
"superior kindness or excellence" of the employers for granted; her surprise is
that this is not recognized by the servant. At the same time, however, she observes
that, in Canada, "no domestic can be treated with cruelty or insolence by an
unbenevolent or arrogant master" (RITB 214). The new environment has
begun to exercise its influence.

The Moodie character's
education is carried on as much by her despised neighbours as it is by her own
experiences. The neighbour, Mrs. D., who berates Moodie for not sharing her dinner
table with her servants, refuses to admit her own black servants to her table.
Unlike earlier confrontations with Mrs. Joe and with others, the Moodie character
here seems to recognize that her hidden assumptions have been revealed and questioned:
"Alas, for our fallen nature! Which is more subversive of peace and Christian
fellowship  ignorance of our own characters, or of the characters of others?" (RITB
228). Thurston notes that when Moodie can situate her characters through narrative,
hold them at a distance, she is comfortable, but that her dis-ease emerges when she is
compelled to engage with them in a dialogic discourse.38
Here, however, both anxiety and distance have given way to an admission of other
perspectives, and the Moodie character is able to respond to Mrs. D. as a
subject whose language can penetrate her own.

Just as the Moodie
character's treatment of her 'inferiors' has become less rigidly containing, her response
to the landscape has been altered by the time the Moodies leave the Melsetter farm for the
woods. While she still bemoans the "singularly savage scene" (RITB
286), she explicitly connects this reaction with her emigration: "The unpeopled
wastes of Canada must present the same aspect tothe new settler that the
world did to our first parents after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden" (RITB
287, emphasis mine). It seems the Moodie character recognizes that her response to
the landscape is socially conditioned, as the centre of organization has recognized
throughout. Her criticisms of the country are now always accompanied by an awareness
that she has come to love this place. Most importantly, she has become able to
associate nature with the new land, and to distinguish between the love of nature and the
love of "home":

[W]e floated past scenes so wild and lovely
 isles that assumed a mysterious look and character in that witching hour. In
moments like these, I ceased to regret my separation from my native land, and, filled with
the love of Nature, my heart forgot for the time the love of home. (RITB
361)

What is "wild" may also be
"lovely," now; and the "lonely wilds" permit the soul to approach God
as well as did the daisied vales of England. While the Moodie character will never
abandon her inherited aesthetic paradigms, and these paradigms continue to operate in much
the same way, her narrow vision of the ideal form of nature has unmistakably altered.
When the time comes to leave the bush, she finds this change in herself complete.

Every object had become endeared to me during my
long exile from civilised life. I loved the lonely lake, with its magnificent belt
of dark pines sighing in the breeze; the cedar-swamp, the summer home of my beloved Indian
friends . . . (RITB 507)

This is the same type of landscape she described
earlier as a "dark prison" of "boundless woods," whose "swampy
margin" and "belt of dark pines," all shed "a barren chillness on the
heart" (RITB 175). The Moodie character's vision of "nature"
has changed enough to admit the beauty of this view, but the meaning of her paradigms is
unaltered: the change in prospect coincides with the return of material prosperity and the
spread of cultivation.

In J.W.D. Moodie's
closing chapter, "Canadian Sketches," the double meaning of "prospect"
becomes explicit. J.W.D. Moodie asserts that "Canada is destined to be one of
the most prosperous countries in the world" (RITB 518). Landscape and
economic potential are irrevocably linked: "The interminable forests  that most
gloomy and forbidding feature in its scenery to the European stranger, should have been
regarded as the most certain proof of its fertility" (RITB 519). These
prospects can only be realized if the colonist defeats the wild landscape:

Nature looks sternly on him, and in order to
preserve his own existence, he must conquer Nature, as it were, by his perseverance and
ingenuity. Each fresh conquest tends to increase his vigour and intelligence, until
he becomes a new man, with faculties of mind which, but for his severe lessons in the
school of adversity, might have lain for ever dormant. (RITB 521)

J.W.D. Moodie appears to share with
Schiller, quoted above, a belief that man's superiority to nature lies in his ability to
control it; both see the value of nature in the authority of the human ego. However,
those moments when the aesthetic paradigms are ruptured allow us to interrogate the
assumptions of these belief systems, whose invariable privileging of the human subject
opacifies the external world. While Roughing It leaves the larger issue of
ideological assumptions unaddressed, Margaret Atwood's revision posits the possibility of
an order of meaning which does not take the human ego as its referent. Lorraine Weir
elaborates this point by noting that the writing of place creates ownership, and imposes a
humanist valorization on the world which sustains "the delusion of human
supremacy."39

The issues raised
by these interrogative moments in Roughing It in the Bush are ultimately
epistemological. If, in the moment of rupture, it is possible to see that the
presence of the human subject renders meaning opaque, the question then becomes, as I
shall show it to be for Margaret Atwood, one which addresses the possibility of sure
knowledge. Is there, Atwood asks, any way to eliminate the presence of the subject
in the signifying chain and comprehend the external world in its unmalleable reality?40

I have intimated that it
is the ruptures in the inherited European aesthetic paradigms, when nature eludes the
control of the objectifying gaze and begins to act as a force, which Atwood seizes upon as
the originating point of her epistemological investigation. The epigraph provides
the most explicit statement in The Journals of Susanna Moodie of the rupturing of
the aesthetic paradigm: "Where my eyes were / every- / thing appears" (JSM
8). The "eyes" are eyes trained to see in inherited modes, but what exists
when the gaze is not directed onto the object is "every- / thing"; in eluding
the gaze of the human subject, the phenomenal world eludes the limits and boundaries
imposed on it by the human desire to have its signification predicated on the authority of
the ego. In "Disembarking at Quebec," we see the landscape endowed with
volition in that it has the power of refusal which I would argue can only inhere in an
autonomous subject: "The moving water will not show me / my reflection," cries
Moodie, "I am a word / in a foreign language" (JSM 11). In refusing
to reflect, re-assert, the importance of the human ego, the phenomenal world has reduced
the Moodie character to the role of signifier, a "word," not even
comprehensible; this reduction involves an interesting inversion of traditional landscape
aesthetics, in which the ultimate referent for the signifying landscape is, as we have
seen, the human ego. In the inversion, the ego becomes a signifier, but one whose
referents are inaccessible, "foreign." The new world landscape and the
Moodie-signifier can thus be seen as different discourses, lacking the metaphor which will
bridge the gap between them.

While Atwood's poetry
assumes the existence of the phenomenal world, she is concerned that the contingency of
language, inescapably oriented toward the subject, renders the phenomenal world opaque.
We have seen that the inadequacy of inherited landscape aesthetics in Roughing
It in the Bush demonstrates the inescapable presence of the human subject in these
sociolects; the Moodie character responds by opening up her aesthetic paradigms so as to
reassert the subject as a transcendent signified. Atwood, on the other hand, rejects
this solution as yet another means of obscuring meaning. Bakhtin suggests that any
possibility of alluding to other linguistic points of view is alien to poetic style, and
thus any sense of historical and social boundedness is also alien.41
For Atwood, however, the notion of a priest-like poetic language is a wished-for,
unattainable ideal; she seeks such a unitary, indisputable discourse, but her poetry
responds instead to Bakhtin's idea of novelistic discourse, in which every element of the
phenomenal world is already "overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged
with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist."42
This characteristic of the utterance is perceived by Atwood to threaten the very
possibility of meaning. The inversion of "Disembarking at Quebec" outlined
above is, I think, symptomatic of Atwood's desire to abridge the subject-object duality in
an effort to know the external world in its ineluctable and unmalleable reality.

The desire for sure
knowledge is Atwoodean, rather than part of Atwood's response to Moodie. In Atwood's
work this desire is manifested by a rigorous examination of the relation between the
external world and the human subjectivity which must always interpret it, and is visible
in Atwood's concern with disguises in poems prior to The Journals of Susanna Moodie.
Atwood is positing an objective reality, sure knowledge of which is obliterated by
the perspective of the subject. Any formulation of that objective reality is only a
version of a language-bound reality,43
so that what we know is always and only known through language. The desire for sure
knowledge is thus inevitably a desire for a sure language which would make such knowing
possible; as Cheryl Walker indicates, it is a metaphysical desire for a bridge between
signifier and signified which can join the two terms to achieve a translucence of meaning
without value-charged reference to the inevitable third term of the subject. Walker
argues that in the later Atwood, the possibility of a text which is ideologically innocent
and transparently referential becomes the object of nostalgia rather than the object of
epistemological investigation it appears to be in the early works.

Moodie struggles
with the disruption of meaning when her languages fail, but there is no evidence that she
addresses the inevitability of the orientation of language toward the subject which is the
heart of this problem, or even that she wishes to. Her concern with the disruption
of meaning is linked to the privileging of a human subject; the failure of her languages
disturbs because the human subject is not valorized. In Atwood, on the other hand,
the desire for sure knowledge is a desire to evade that subject orientation whose lack so
disturbs Moodie. Desire for sure knowledge in Atwood is inevitably an ontological
concern, as well as an epistemological one: it is a concern with meaning, at the root of
which is a concern with the essential being-in-itself of things, in the Heideggerean
sense, and thus with immanence. This is most clearly seen in Atwood's concern with
the loss of meaning, and I suggest that what many critics see as a stance against
modernity in Atwood is better understood as a stance against encroaching insignificance.
After all, as Rosenberg points out, the total valorization of nature, which is often
cited as evidence of Atwood's anti-modernity stance, is frequently revealed in her poetry
as an emotional or intellectual dead end.44
Rosenberg makes it clear that "it is not so much our building cities . . . to
which Atwood objects; rather, it is our forgetting what we are building them
against."45
In Atwood's work, we may frequently observe that when the meaning of our rituals is
forgotten or half-obscured, those rituals are drained of meaning and become insignificant:
they fail to signify. Similarly, many of Moodie's linguistic rituals, translated
from their home soil, have been drained of meaning: the titles of "sir" and
"madam," for instance, have been completely transvalued by the local
inhabitants, so that they fail to signify any longer in Moodie's system of signs, forcing
her to examine the content of those titles so that a different meaning may ultimately be
restored. As Tinkler points out, Moodie's sensitivity to language is acute,
reflecting a strong sense of the inherited norms of language, which she believes should
remain unambiguous for social intercourse.46
Her response to the custom of borrowing (Ch. 5) is violent, says Tinkler, because
of the radical change in its meaning;47
as McCarthy notes in his discussion of the same anecdote, when words cease to mean, the
order they describe ceases to exist.48

Above all, it is the
problem of perception, "overlain with qualifications, open to dispute," that is
under epistemological and ontological investigation in these poems. And the contrast
of perceptions  of Moodie, of other immigrants, of Atwood herself  is the
vehicle of this investigation, as in "The Planters":

They deny the ground they stand on,

pretend this dirt is the future.
And they are right. If they let go
of that illusion solid to them as a shovel,

open their eyes even for a moment
to these trees, to this particular sun
they would be surrounded, stormed, broken

in upon by branches, roots, tendrils, the dark
side of light
as I am. (JSM 16-17)

The illusion that "this dirt is the
future" is a necessary one in this context, since its promise of controlling the
environment enables the planters to keep the Schillerean force of nature at bay. If
they let go, if they forget against what forces they plant, they too will be
"surrounded, stormed, broken / in upon."

Atwood's Moodie is, of
course, aware of the power that inheres in her gaze. Her fear of "The
Wereman" is unmistakably a fear of what will happen when her object eludes her gaze,
that in entering the forest, he will be "blotted out" (JSM 19).
McCarthy's discussion of the prophylactic function of landscape conventions49
in Roughing It in the Bush allows us to suggest that the disruption of these
conventions, in "The Wereman," threatens to obliterate the object
entirely. Atwood's Moodie asks herself, "Unheld by my sight / what does he
change into / what other shape . . ." and we can see that Atwood's Moodie is
unmistakably losing her grip on the object of her gaze. Since her gaze can be said
to construct a reality, she is also losing control of that reality. Without that
control, the phenomenal world assumes a meaning she cannot fathom. This Moodie is
aware that her perceptions do not encompass an external reality which is proving itself
unmalleable: ". . . it may be / only my idea of him / I will find returning / with
him hiding behind it." With the power of her gaze called into question,
Atwood's Moodie shows herself in "The Wereman" to be aware of her new position
as object of another's gaze, the first time this possibility has been recognized:

He may change me also
with the fox eye, the owl
eye, the eightfold
eye of the spider. (JSM 19)

In my reading, the subjects of this gaze are
multiple now, including both the denizens of the landscape and Moodie's beloved partner.
Once the objects of this Moodie's gaze, they have escaped, and the terms of the
gaze are terrifyingly inverted here and in the next poem, "Paths and
Thingscape," in which Atwood's Moodie is "watched like an invader / who knows
hostility but / not where" (JSM 21). The deliberate inversion of
inherited European aesthetic paradigms is suggested by the word "thingscape" in
the title. The possibility of a landscape, in the European sense, has been abandoned
in the "thin refusal" made by "these vistas of desolation"; the
vagueness of "thingscape" to me implies both the phenomenal world's refusal of
Moodiean terms and her own inability to negotiate "the drizzle of strange
meaning."

What renders the
signifier incomprehensible in the new context is the complete lack of a referent; Atwood's
Moodie has come to a country where her "damaged / knowing of the language means /
prediction is forever impossible." When referentiality disappears from ritual
and from language, the possibility of referentiality and ontological meaning is abandoned
and language becomes a prison-house. It is this prison-house in which Atwood's
Moodie is trapped, the prison-house of inherited paradigms of landscape appreciation which
generalize, as all second-order languages must, and, by generalizing, empty the phenomenal
world of its history and particularity; that is, of its own meaning as itself.50

Atwood's Moodie quickly
realizes that the inherited paradigms are useless, and the complete inversion of "Two
Fires" marks a desire in her for new and particular knowledge. The fires, says
Atwood's Moodie, "in- / formed me," both forming and informing her; she has been
irrevocably changed, and the "charred marks" around which she will now "try
to grow" may be read as the ruins of her old paradigms, "what was left of their
scorched dream." Bilan reads the "scorched dream" as the dream of
imposing the old order on the new world.51
What remains, as we see in "Looking in a Mirror," (JSM 24-25) is
the parenthetical suspicion that there is no translucent meaning undistorted by
subjectivity, a suspicion that always accompanies mirrors in Atwood's work.
"Mirrors," she tells us, "are crafty";52
because in the act of reflecting, suspending, preserving the gazing subject mirrors
disguise their own depth. There is a phenomenal reality, Atwood suggests, which is
obscured by the ineluctable presence of the subject in the mirror. Atwood's Moodie,
looking in the mirror, finds only "the shape you already are / but what / if you have
forgotten that." In my reading, Atwood's Moodie is unavoidably present in the
mirror, but at the same time the loss of her interpretive paradigms suggests that without
the ultimate referent of her own subjectivity, now almost unrecognizable, the possibility
of a new knowledge, new paradigms, emerges. It may be that Atwood's Moodie's
commitment to her new country enables an undamaged knowing of the language, and this
possibility is the focus of Journal II.

In "The Death of a
Young Son by Drowning" the child Atwood's Moodie plants "in this country / like
a flag" (JSM 31) is the sign of a new covenant53
which binds her to the land. The Moodie of Roughing It in the Bush, as well,
is bound to her new country in this way: "I will and do love thee," she says,
"land of my adoption, and of my children's birth; and, oh, dearer still to a mother's
heart  land of their graves!" (RITB 65-66). Until the death of her
son brings her into contact with the land, Atwood's Moodie has remained an immigrant, one
who migrates, always journeying toward "the land [she] floated on / but could not
touch to claim." In this respect she is much like the Moodie character of Roughing
It in the Bush, whom Giltrow describes as "operating on an abstract plane of
diffuse enthusiasm."54
For Giltrow, Moodie's neglect of concrete details in landscape representation is that of
the tourist, whose pleasure in the landscape does not anticipate incorporation into the
scene, but is instead a "quick, unimplicating view of foreign sites."55
Similarly, Atwood's Moodie cannot see the particularity of her new country, so that
the landscape remains generalized, mutable as waves. The death which marks her
covenant with the land enables the environment to leap to "solidity." One of the
effects of this covenant suggested by the poem is an attempt at a first-order language
which emphasizes the particularity of things: "the new grass / lept to solidity; / my
hands glistened with details" (JSM 31). And yet we are not privy to these
details; the return to first-order language is promised, but not actualized.

When the death of her
son enables Atwood's Moodie to end her migration, she begins to disassociate herself from
"The Immigrants," who "think they will make an order like the old one"
(JSM 32). Atwood argues in Survival that, for the Canadian settler,
the new country is a place of exile in which the old country must be recreated, a desire
which reflects a vision of the universe in which order is inherent.56
She also notes, and I think these points are linked, that Canadian writing appears
to distrust nature, frequently expressing the sentiment that nature has betrayed
expectation, that "it was supposed to be different."57
I suggest that what is betrayed, in fact, is the belief that there is a natural
order inherent in the universe. David Stoucks makes this connection as well, in his
discussion of Roughing It in the Bush:

Seeking a haven in which to preserve customs
threatened at home is imaginatively at the opposite pole from rejecting the old order and
emigrating in order to begin life anew. The backward-looking nature of the Canadian
experience is reflected in Mrs. Moodie's nostalgia for the daisy-covered fields of
her England home.58

Nature betrays expectation because it is not the
daisy-covered fields of England; it does not reflect the natural order and human supremacy
presupposed by British landscape paradigms. While these observations fairly
represent the stance of the Moodie character, Atwood's Moodie both recognizes this
position and disassociates herself from it in the poem "The Immigrants."
Their modes of perception now fail to signify for her: "the old countries
recede, become / perfect, thumbnail castles preserved / like gallstones" (JSM
32). The distance between signifier and signified in the immigrant's paradigms is so
enormous here that the signifiers not only fail to signify, but have become entirely
banal. Atwood's Moodie has only become able to see the banality of such modes of
perception once she has made the break from them herself; it is one of the things she has
discovered, as she says in "The 1837 War in Retrospect" by "being there /
and after" (JSM 35). In this poem, images reminiscent of television, a
transparent figure for banality, are used to suggest the fate of signifiers completely
divorced from their referents:

that this war will soon be among
those tiny ancestral figures
flickering dull white through the back of your skull,
confined, anxious, not sure any more
what they are doing there.

It seems to me that the
focus of Journal II is the falling away into insignificance of inherited paradigms, a
falling away which approaches the banal. This, Atwood appears to suggest, occurs
when the ineluctable orientation of language-bound reality toward its subject becomes a
solipsistic perspective incapable of contemplating the possibility of meaning which is not
centred around the subject. The 1837 war, divorced of any significance except that
which refers back to the human subject, is meaningless; what it was fought against, like
what the planters worked against in the earlier poem, has been forgotten. Atwood
suggests through her Moodie that the presence of the human subject inhibits any
possibility of seeing those events and their meaning clearly.

Part of what is obscured
by the privileging of the subject is the explicitly political dimension of acts and
events. The exhortation of "The Charivari"  "Resist those
cracked / drumbeats. Stop this. Become human" (JSM 37)  is
unmistakably Atwood, not the voice of the Moodie character, and it is interesting that the
voice of the poet has become explicit in order to make the political dimension of the
anecdote explicit. The presence of Atwood's Moodie, it seems, would obscure this
dimension of its significance; in the absence of Moodie-as-subject, Atwood can pretend to
an objective recognition of reality and its significance that has hitherto been implicit.

The second journal
closes with the assertion that Atwood's Moodie has acquired that "other
knowledge" which has been the wished-for focus of all the poems in this section:

that men sweat
always and drink often
that pigs are pigs
but must be eaten
anyway. (JSM 42)

She has moved far from the "rituals of
seasons and rivers" whose European meanings are forgotten, half-obscured, and in
achieving that "other knowledge" has reduced the gap between signifier and
signified. "Pigs are pigs"; these are the details which
"glistened" in her hands.

"There is,"
says this Moodie in the first poem of Journal III, "no use for art" (JSM
47). Those "verses about love and sleighbells," whose exchange-value is no
longer necessary for material comfort, contain none of the "other knowledge"
with its potentially radicalizing power, and are seen as entirely banal. The
difficulty here is finding a language which will express the history and particularity of
its signifieds; again, we see that Atwood is seeking a translucent sign, while hinting
that such an im-mediate meaning may finally be unobtainable in language. In order to
achieve translucent meaning, Atwood's Moodie must cast off the mediating subjectivity
which in its most extreme form is the complete self-referentiality of "Solipsism
While Dying" (JSM 52-53). Once this is accomplished, Atwood's Moodie
will be able to break out of the prison-house of language and hear the "stone voices
of the land" say

god is not
the voice in the whirlwind

god is the whirlwind

at the last
judgement we will all be trees. (JSM 58-59)

The representation of
the landscape through Roughing It's cacophony of voices makes it apparent that the
Moodie character's treatment of the landscape is a conventional one, dependent on
eighteenth-century paradigms. These paradigms involve a privileging of the human
subject that reflects a belief in a natural order inherent in the universe, which order
affirms human supremacy and in particular the supremacy of the English. Although the
Moodie character becomes aware of the inability of her paradigms to adequately reflect the
land before her, she can never interrogate the assumptions on which those paradigms are
based.

Atwood, however, reacts
to Moodie's presentation by supplying the interrogation of assumptions Moodie can never
achieve. Nostalgic for a unitary, indisputable poetic discourse which is
ideologically innocent and transparently referential, she queries the privileging of the
human subject which overlays meaning with qualifications and disputes. Only through
a sure and translucent language, Atwood suggests, can sure knowledge of the phenomenal
world, in its history and particularity, its ineluctable and unmalleable reality, be
achieved, and such a language can only be posited through the abandonment of the idea of
an inherent natural order, the Logos. Once the possibility of transcendence is
abandoned, something does survive, in the noumenal realm of the whirlwind. This can
only be described through language, but Atwood posits the possibility here, which she will
shortly abandon, of eventual sure knowledge, achieved through an apocalyptic immanence, of
the apprehension of things, "not as they are but as they are."

Notes

See Sherrill E. Grace, "Moodie and
Atwood: Notes on a Literary Reincarnation," in John Moss, ed., Beginnings: A
Critical Anthology, Vol. 2 of The Canadian Novel (Toronto: E.C.W., 1980); Laura
Groening, "The Journals of Susanna Moodie: A Twentieth Century Look at a
Nineteenth Century Life," Studies in Canadian Literature 8 (1983) 166-180; Ann
Boutelle, "Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and Their Nineteenth Century
Forerunners," in Alice Kessler Harris and William McBrien, eds., Faith of a
(Woman) Writer (Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1988); Eva-Marie Kroller,
"Resurrections: Susanna Moodie, Catherine Parr Traill, and Emily Carr in Contemporary
Canadian Literature," Journal of Popular Culture 15 (1981) 39-46; and Al
Purdy, "Atwood's Moodie," Canadian Literature 47 (1971) 80-84. [back]

Margaret Atwood, "Afterword," The
Journals of Susanna Moodie (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1970) 62. Further references to
appear in parentheses in the text, prefaced by the abbrev. JSM. [back]

Anna Balakian, "Influence and Literary
Fortune: The Equivocal Conjunction of Two Methods," Yearbook of Contemporary and
Canadian Literature 11 (1962) 27-28. Balakian uses the example of inaccurate
translations, which may either transfigure a work or produce an outright contradiction of
meaning which is nevertheless highly influential. [back]

Bina Freiwald, "'The tongue of woman':
The Language of the Self in Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush," in Lorraine
McMullen, ed., Re(Dis)Covering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women
Writers, Reappraisals: Canadian Writers Ser. (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1990)
161-162; Groening 169. Groening also suggests that the poems in JSM adopt the
critical position outlined in the "Afterword," a reading which reduces these
poems to the single aspect of psychologizing the immigrant experience and which fails to
take into account the epistemological interrogation Atwood undertakes in this collection. [back]

This summary of Kristeva's contribution to
intertextuality is Morgan's, p. 22. [back]

John Thurston has noted the value of Bakhtin's
theory in understanding the characters of Roughing It, but neglects the importance
of the sociolects of landscape aesthetics. Thurston, "Re-writing Roughing It,"
in John Moss, ed., Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature,
Reappraisals: Canadian Writers Ser. (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1987) 200-203. [back]

William Gairdner, "Traill and Moodie: The
Two Realities," Journal of Canadian Fiction 1 (1972) 39. [back]

The picturesque can be roughly divided into
two schools of thought, one headed by Uvedale Price, the other by Payne Knight.
Price held that picturesque beauty involved certain qualities inherent in the object,
qualities which one could learn to recognize through exposure to art, in particular, to
the Italian landscape painters who first established the picturesque. Knight, on the
other hand, asserted that the picturesque consisted only of a manner of viewing things
with an eye and mind educated in the principles of painting. In either case, it is
abundantly apparent that the object of the gaze is valued only as it can be related to the
human sign of art. See Christopher Hussey for an extended discussion of Price and
Knight, as well as other practitioners of the picturesque. [back]

Carole Fabricant, "The Aesthetics and
Politics of Landscape in the Eighteenth Century," in Ralph Cohen, ed., Studies in
Eighteenth Century British Art and Aesthetics (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985)
50-51. [back]

Susanna Strickland Moodie, Roughing It in
the Bush, or, Forest Life in Canada (1852), Carl Ballstadt, ed. Centre for Editing
Early Canadian Texts Ser. 5 (Ottawa: Carlteton UP, 1988) 17-22. All further
references will appear in parentheses in the text, accompanied by the abbrev. RITB.
[back]

D.M.R. Bentley, "Breaking the 'Cake of
Custom': The Atlantic Crossing as a Rubicon for Female Emigrants to Canada?," in
McMullen, ed., 116-118. [back]

Dermot McCarthy, "Ego in a Green Prison:
Confession and Repression in Roughing It in the Bush," Wascana Review
14 (1979) 8. While much of McCarthy's article is seriously undermined by his
dependence on Atwood's "Afterword" for his understanding of Moodie, it
nevertheless contains several interesting remarks. [back]

Gillian Whitlock, "The Bush, the
Barrack-Yard, and the Clearing: 'Colonial Realism' in the Sketches and Stories of Susanna
Moodie, C.L.R. James, and Henry Lawson," The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
20 (1985) 39. [back]

Freiwald considers this aspect of nature in
Moodie to be an indication of her preoccupation with maternal feelings, but ignores the
broader cultural implications of Moodie's landscape aesthetic. Freiwald 168-169. [back]

For an interesting discussion of the similar
function of "prospect" in "The Rising Village," see Kenneth J. Hughes,
"Oliver Goldsmith's 'The Rising Village'," Canadian Poetry 1 (1977)
39-40. Hughe's useful observations link the ambiguous usage of "prospect"
to opening up, commercial expansion, and the spread of civilization. [back]

Dennis Duffy's book, Gardens, Convenants,
Exiles: Loyalism in the Literature of Upper Canada / Ontario (Toronto: U of Toronto P,
1982), proposes a paradigm of Upper Canadian literature based on the "Loyalist
myth" of exile in the wilderness followed by a garden regained. He suggests the
notion of a convenant, a social pact, which made the creation of a precarious garden in
the wilderness possible, and argues that the War of 1812, and other hardships, confirmed
the strength of the covenant in blood. The symbolic pattern Duffy describes as laid
upon the facts of defeat, exile, endurance, and ultimate mastery of the new land does seem
to illuminate Moodie's response to the death of her children. [back]